2 Nics at once?

[pcilliterate]

Hello,
I just had a crazy thought, and it might be a silly question.

Is it possible to run a PCI Nic and a USB nic on the same machine in XPpro through a 4 port router?

If so are there any benifits?

Thanx,

Be on the look out for <A HREF="http://www.austmus.gov.au/thylacine/" target="_new">Thylacinus cynocephalus</A>

 

[Retruglot]

Hehe... I have 3 PCI NICs in my machine.. they work just fine. The benefits you ask? Well, I was trying to finger out how to get a new IP address on demand.

However, if you have 2 cable/DSL connections (1 for each NIC) you might get a higher transfer rate? Not that I could really see much benefit to it.

Hmm... you might also be able to use one for the highspeed connection and one NIC to connect to another PC?



Thanks,
Ret

Hope this helps...

 

[piasabird]

Routers use IP/network addresses. If 2 cards have the same network address it could cause problems. If the 2 nic devices went to 2 different networks like WAN/LAN that would probably be another thing altogether.

when you see smoke is that a good sign?

 

[piasabird]

There are probably some exceptions to this, because I think some servers are designed to use 2 NIC cards to speed up and do load balancing.

when you see smoke is that a good sign?

 

[jihiggs]

no matter how you figure it, your not going to see any increase if you add a usb nic, they are slow as molasses.

how do you shoot the devil in the back? what happens if you miss? -verbal

 

[upec]

I agree. USB NIC are very slow.

 

[Jeff68005]

Possible? Yes.
Gain anything? NO Not via a router.

There would need to be a valid NETWORKing reason to do so.


Every working computer must be improved .... or replaced ...

 

[Secretninja]

In XP you can bridge the connection. I think this means you can assign one IP address for the 2 cards and share the bandwidth. As far as I can tell this would only be of use if you have a switch, as using a hub would give you so many collisions it would be nuts, and also the only time it would get use to any where near full would be when you either have the system setup as a server which gets hits from lots of machines or if you have bridged NIC’s in two computers giving a theoretical 200Mb/s bandwidth (or around 24MB/s). Only of use if doing lots of big file transfers.

Now thats what I want to know!

 

[CALV]

you can bridge connections in 2k/xp (not sure about earlier versions)

You will get faster connection from ISP- IF the isp supports this, I never found one that does, you are basically making 2 connections to the isp and "joining them"

The main reason an "average" pc would have 2 cards, is to rout a cable connection to a lan, 1 card conencted to the cablemodem (would have the IP from the cable providor), the other to the lan (IP assigned by yourself for the LAN). You can of course have more than two, really not much use in a home environment, but if you had a server with a lot of conenctions, as mentioned, an extra card(s) could be used for load balancing (in effect, splitting the data to be transferred between 2 or more LAN cards), or if you had multiple subnets.

If they squeeze olives to get olive oil, how do they get baby oil?

 

[Secretninja]

I think you can bridge modems in 98 onwards.
With regard to using 2 NIC’s for routing, that is true and I had not thought about that. One computer might have the Cable/DSL connection on it and the other one goes to the rest of the network. The computer that had the Cable/DSL connection could then be set up as a proxy server with a firewall. It could also be set up as a web server, e-mail server etc which is what I plan to do as soon as I can get some sort of broadband connection were if live. Also the computer that will have the 2 NIC’s in will be a fairly old pc due to the lower power requirements so it will be on at all time and I will stick the largest hard drive I can it in, so it can be constantly downloading and then forward all the stuff to my main pc.


Now thats what I want to know!

 

[CALV]

HI,

IF the pc is old, you may be as well just using it as a firewall/router and not a server, if thats the case, just about ANY pc will do, I use a p60 for mine, I run freesco which runs from a floppy so I dont even need a hdd in it. If you are going to use it as a web/mail server, depending on the amount of traffic you are expecting, the "old" pc may or may not be up to the task, whats the spec of the old pc? and how many concurrent connections are you expecting on the mail/web server?


If they squeeze olives to get olive oil, how do they get baby oil?